Economics

Regulation

Warning: unlicensed blogger

ADAM OZIMEK has written a very nice post on occupational licensing. I'm not sure there's much I can add to it, so I'll just quote one bit and encourage you to read the rest:

Another problem is that occupational licensing is often a tool with which one occupation fends off competition from another, usually lower wage, occupation. For instance, many states have regulations preventing dental hygienists from practicing without the supervision of a dentist. Dentists have an average of six years more schooling than a hygienists, who on average have 2.6 years of post high-school education. In addition, dentists make on average $100 an hour, and are 80% male, whereas hygiensts are 97% female and make around $37 an hour. Kleiner and Park find that these regulations transfer $1.5 billion dollars a year from hygiensts to dentists. This is a highly regressive transfer to a male dominated, higher educated, higher paid job from a female dominated, lower educated, lower paid job. In a very similar vein with likely similar impacts, many states restrict the ability of nurses to practice without the supervision of doctors. In fact these regulations are currently growing as regulators rush to restrict the number of nurses working in retail health clinics in a variety of ways to prevent them from competing with doctors.

This is obviously bad for nurses, but it's also bad for patients. They'll either pay more for the care they receive with no real gain in quality, or go without (or, in disturbing cases, go to underground practitioners).